Yeah, this is Horvath again. My biggest complaint about his research is that it is almost entirely correlation. Horvath specifically blames "edtech" as the reason for the decline, completely glossing over what this article seems to claim as the cause, short form videos and content. Not to mention all of the other societal shifts during this time, like the effects of No Child Left behind on schools.

Anytime I see this guy trotted out and his claims said as fact I just can't take the article seriously.

Fun fact: Depression affects many things. Attention span, reaction time, engagement, memory, higher reasoning, spatial awareness... All things that (tangentially or directly) affect perceived intelligence.

Pretty damn good chance that we're all sad because we know damn well just how fucked the world is, and we burned out before we ever got a chance to try.

... that said, I'll totally take that hug. Hugs are great. 🫂

Yep, we got shit thrown at us, and in some ways it built good traits in us. But there was still some hope along with the fears in our time. I don't think we passed much of that down.

Same. However, it doesn’t make this any less true. And things aren’t boding well for Gen Alpha.

Listen, conservatives haven't been working tirelessly for decades to erode American education just to have someone on the internet give the credit to the outcomes they cultivated..

Also AI chatbots. LLMs pretty much sealed it and will make Gen alpha perform even lower. Well, it will make everyone perform lower long term but Gen Alpha won‘t learn a lot of important thinking skills.

I don’t think this is to say they’re complete idiots. It’s just that as a collective, their averages are notably lower.

And probably homophobic

I'm hopeful that by the time my nephew has worked out what his fingers are for the AI bubble will have popped and we can have moved back to some sort of reality.

The thing with us Millennials is we had to learn like multiple generations worth of stuff and then proceed to not only teach the older generation what we learned but also the younger generations. So naturally there are gaps.

It didn't include us because we taught ourselves a lot of things because we had to, there was no one teaching us these things. We went from living in the early 80s and having dial up phones, tvs with maybe 3 channels, and for the vast majority of us no access to a computer. then suddenly we transition to cable tv, computers, cell phones, the internet, how to use the internet, how to build websites for the internet, how to communicate with others on the internet, online gaming, smart phones, how to use smart phones, high speed internet, CRT tvs to Plasma to HD, Beta to VHS to Laser discs to DVDs to bluray. having access to very little information to suddenly having access to all the information.

We had to learn how to use ALL this stuff and then teach Gen X and older how to use it followed up by Gen Z and younger. and that's just the technology. that's not including all the massive changes to society that happened during our formative years.

The younger generations don't have any of these massive leaps because it's all kind of stagnated or regressed. They're not "forced" to learn anything new to use it or navigate it because we already did that for them. Gen Z doesn't have to create content like we did, it's all provided for them and most of it is of poor quality. Our content creation consisted of building our own websites, PHP forums, IRC rooms, building our own social networks, chatrooms, games, etc. They don't have to do this.

And as far as education it's the same deal. Remember we were told that we had to learn all this math because we'd never be able to "carry around a calculator with us at all times". or we had to learn cursive because "that's how everyone writes". or that we MUST go to college because THAT'S the only way to get a job. Again because of the technology we built Gen Z and younger doesn't need any of that, they don't need to learn it and they're not learning it.

At the end of the day we thought we'd be making their lives easier with what we HAD to learn but in turn, we've made their lives harder because we didn't tell them WHY we had to learn it. we just handed it all to them and said "good luck."

Millennial here. The only thing surprising about a downward trend is that it didn’t start with Gen X and get progressively worse, to include us, with each generation.

Having less lead floating around probably helped raise the intelligence level a bit from when boomers were mainlining that shit from all the cars driving around.

poor brian

The teachers I talked to told me children who had remote classes for a year were all behind both mentally and emotionally, not even because of infection, just because they basically skipped a year of life.

I guess we can easily say this is a cycle. I wonder what's the interval.

Almost everything we know about Socrates is via Plato (Xenophon also mentions him, and there are some satirical references to him in Aristophanes). Plato ran an academy for the offspring of aristocrats, so he had a strong vested financial interest in propagandizing in favor of hierarchy and authority. This is one example.

100%

I’m Gen X and starting to see a lot of the boomer “uphill both ways to school in the snow with no shoes” bullshit from Gen X. STFU you asshats. My generation simultaneously says it had the greatest time and then turns around and whines about whatever manufactured hardship they come up with when talking about outher gens.

Yeah, we DID and DO have the best of both pre- and post-tech worlds, we arguably had the last shot at the traditional school, college, walk-in-your-resumee career, then buy a home, and the generational motto is “fuck you” if anyone even remembers us, but siddown. Don’t turn into our parents, you assholes.

I will when they will.

Drop in intelligence made people trust IQ scores were more than the garbage science they are. 😔

Spend enough time talking about something, and people will start to consider a serious topic worth discussing.

Fads? Science on intelligence is solid and progressing steadily. We now can point to specific neural processes that determine how well brain operates and explain differences in intelligence. Popular understanding of intelligence is still stuck on basic IQ tests used to compare completely different populations. At some point some feel-good concepts like EQ caught on and it was fashionable to dismiss IQ as ableism or something. You can still see a lot of it but I guess enough research on intelligence is done and some of it still leaks through to the public.

Enjoy!